Clostridium Difficile is a main pathogenic bacterium which causes diarrhea in patients due to antibiotic use. The symptoms comprise slight diarrhea and serious intestinal inflammation, such as pseudomembranous enteritis, toxic megacolon, and bacteriemia, which may cause death if the symptoms become serious enough. Clostridium Difficile can be spread in spore form. In past studies, it was found that the Clostridium difficile infection (C. difficile infection; CDI) rate has gradually increasing tendency in Taiwan (Px Zheng, Genome Announc. 2013. 1:e00149-12.). According to statistics by the United States Disease Control Agency, 100,000 American patients die from nosocomial infections and the resulting mortality rate is climbing each year (M F Shih., Int. J. Immunopathol. Pharmacol. 2012. 25:39-48.2). The current clinical treatment of Clostridium Difficile is that if the use of antibiotics induces the CDI symptoms, it is recommended to stop the current use of antibiotics, and then use metronidazole and vancomycin in accordance with the severity of the disease. However, the two drugs are ineffective treatments for certain patients or have a high recurrence rate (Y C Lin, 2011. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 55: 1701-5.).
In addition to the drug resistance of the Clostridium Difficile, a current difficulty of treatment is that the patient cannot generate a proper protective immune response, and this may cause repetitive infection problems. Because the CDI rate in medical care institutions is gradually increasing, and there is a possible recurrence during treatment, the search for non-antibiotic treatment and the improvement for the CDI have become more important problems requiring more attention.
Although it has been found in the past that certain strains of Lactobacillus have a strong bacteriostatic ability against Clostridium Difficile, which improves the symptoms of mice infected with Clostridium Difficile, it has not reported that the lactic acid bacteria can enhance the inflammatory symptoms of CDI through immune-regulation.
It is therefore necessary to provide an anti-inflammatory Lactobacillus Fermentum strain and a composition thereof, and a use of the Lactobacillus Fermentum strain to produce the composition for improving the symptoms of Clostridium Difficile infection, in order to solve the problems existing in the conventional technology as described above.